Ruckus and The Cloud Provide a Smarter WiFi User Experience at American Express Community Stadium

SUNNYVALE, CA and LONDON – June 10, 2015 – Ruckus Wireless, Inc. (NYSE: RKUS) and The Cloud, a Sky company, announced today that the American Express Community Stadium (The AMEX) is providing an exceptional interactive user experience with the successful deployment of a Ruckus Smart WiFi network. For football club fans, as well as attendees of other events held at The AMEX, the new network provides spectators access to free, high-performance WiFi throughout the entire stadium.

Tweet this Located in Falmer, Brighton, East Sussex, England (UK), The AMEX is one of the most modern stadiums in the UK. Home to the Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club—the Seagulls, The AMEX seats approximately 35,000 people, hosting a variety of sporting events, concerts, conferences, and exhibitions. It has become one of the most popular meeting and events venues on the South Coast, regularly catering to conferences and some 23+ home soccer games a season. The AMEX will also host games during the upcoming 2015 Rugby World Cup.

Brighton & Hove Management Company - who manages The AMEX - made a strategic decision to expand WiFi connectivity beyond the corporate boxes and meeting venues to all areas of the stadium. The new Ruckus Smart WiFi network operated and managed for them by The Cloud is comprised of approximately 100 Ruckus ZoneFlex™ indoor and outdoor access points. It spans the Stadium’s stands, bars, concourses and press areas, improving the match day experience by giving Seagulls fans the ability to browse the web, tweet, bet in-play and use the Seagull’s new mobile app, which provides a live match score center, player profiles, exclusive manager and player interviews, and a range of other content. The new network has also helped streamline stadium operations using in-house apps, and augments expensive and often spotty 3G/4G cellular data service.
“Our fans want to get online–everything from catching up on scores to uploading videos from the stands. The ability to get online has become a big part of match day,” said Paul Barber, CEO at Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club. “For us, mobile is a great way of bringing the fans closer to the action and there’s an opportunity to expand on that in the future with competitions, games or other interactive tools. Having fast, free Internet across the ground is key to engaging with fans.”

Experts in building high capacity WiFi public networks, The Cloud is one of Europe’s biggest public WiFi providers, and the largest in the UK. It has worked on sporting projects similar to this at the home of English cricket (Lord’s) and motor racing (Silverstone), and was aware of the challenges presented by these types of deployments, and how to solve them. The Cloud had very stringent design requirements for The AMEX to address different usage, mobility, density and concurrent connectivity scenarios. These ranged from being able to consistently deliver 2 Mbps of wireless capacity to each user in high density environments for HD video streaming, to supporting four devices per 10 square meters and the ability to connect 50 percent of all users during a full stadium event.

How Smart Stadium WiFi is Done

The Cloud needed to provide The AMEX with a complete, turnkey, high-speed, high capacity, secure, free WiFi service that could deliver ubiquitous, strong signal coverage both indoors and out. The Cloud also required flexible deployment options—both wired and mesh, support for 10,000+ concurrent client connections, rich analytics and robust centralized management. Ruckus Smart WiFi has delivered on all counts. “Exceptional stadium WiFi is predicated on explicit control of WiFi signals and a smarter approach to RF design,” said Sami Susiaho, head of Edge Technologies for The Cloud. “With Ruckus, the results have been remarkable.”

Ruckus-patented BeamFlex™ adaptive antenna technology has enabled The Cloud to consistently deliver WiFi signal strength of -65dB or better throughout AMEX Stadium. “With high density WiFi, conventional wisdom is that more APs are better,” said Susiaho. “What’s really needed is a smarter and well thought through approach to signal propagation, because you simply can’t control what the client does. But with the right WiFi technology, you can control how the network interacts with clients to help ensure the best possible user experience.”

The Cloud has installed over 80 Ruckus ZoneFlex outdoor access points (APs) to the roof superstructure near the Stadium’s speakers, so as to ring the pitch space. Each AP has the capacity to service up to 200 users and designed to cover a block of 400 seats. As demand increases, the design gives The Cloud the ability to easily scale the network to support increased user engagement by simply adding more access points as, and when, required.

“We have worked extensively with Ruckus and have previously deployed some 40,000 APs all over Europe, so we know the quality and effectiveness of its technology,” added Susiaho. “We tested a dozen access points from different vendors, and it was simply no contest—Ruckus was the only one that was up for the job.”

Ruckus ZoneFlex carrier-class, outdoor access points are designed specifically to address high-density environments such as sports stadiums, where thousands of people are gathered together in close proximity. The access points at The AMEX are centrally managed using two Ruckus ZoneDirector™ 5000 controllers, with one located on each side of the Stadium, which provides easy and scalable network management for large-scale wireless environments like stadiums.

As part of managing The AMEX network, The Cloud is also utilizing the Ruckus SmartCell™ Insight (SCI) big data analytics platform. Ruckus SCI provides predictive analysis that The Cloud can use to determine future user behavior in order to stay ahead of data demand. In addition, The Cloud is able to quickly view and extract a myriad of important network performance data such as upstream and downstream traffic volumes by device and device type, RF channel capacity between APs and stations, access points with the greatest traffic volumes, and most importantly, the potential client throughputs.

Since deploying the Ruckus Smart WiFi infrastructure, The Cloud has reported that during a recent match they saw over 13,000 devices connect concurrently, consuming a staggering 600,000 minutes of online time and over 10,000 megabytes of data downloaded—more than twice the average match day use. “The network we’ve designed and deployed at The AMEX using Ruckus is a model for how to do WiFi right in high density environments. The RF design is spot on. It’s exactly what we predicted it would be. That’s the truth. I love the way this turned out,” concluded Susiaho.

Media Contacts

The Cloud (www.thecloud.co.uk) builds and operates WiFi networks across the UK and Europe to provide the mobile media experience that consumers want. The service delivers simple, fast and cost effective broadband to millions of WiFi enabled smartphones, laptops and entertainment devices. The Cloud has exclusive commercial partnerships with retail, leisure, hotels, sports, transport, and entertainment and content partners to deliver its longer-term vision of a connected society. The Cloud has over 9 million registered users connecting for over 2 billion minutes a month at over 22,000 live locations such as Marks & Spencer, the City of London, Wetherspoon, PizzaExpress, Caffe Nero, Eat, pubs, leisure facilities, restaurants and mainline stations. Approximately 9 million people pass through The Cloud network everyday by visiting one of its partners, including major outlets such as WHSmith, Greggs, Pret and Wagamama, as well as First Great Western and Network Rail stations. The Cloud is a Sky Company.

BeamFlex, Ruckus, Ruckus Wireless, SmartCell, ZoneDirector, and ZoneFlex are trademarks of Ruckus Wireless, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product or company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.